


Someone Should Know

by flashwitch



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, Gen, I Believe in Jasper Sitwell, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Jasper Sitwell is Not Hydra, Post-HYDRA Reveal, Torture, Well he is, but it's not his fault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-15
Updated: 2016-05-15
Packaged: 2018-06-08 15:45:48
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6861235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flashwitch/pseuds/flashwitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jasper Sitwell was once a rising star in SHIELD. He worked hard. He had good intuition. He made good connections. </p><p>No one remembers that now. They remember the Hydra stooge.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Someone Should Know

**Author's Note:**

> This is a question I've been thinking about for a while: How do we know that Bucky Barnes was the only brainwashed Hydra agent? 
> 
> I'm pretty sure it has been done already but this is my take on it. 
> 
> See end for trigger warnings.

 

 

Jasper Sitwell was a good man once. He believed in things. He believed in SHIELD. He believed in what he was doing.

Then Hydra happened. _(Hail Hydra!)_

No one knew they were still around. He had no reason to expect it. He was supposed to be _safe._ He was a goddamn secret agent. No one was supposed to be able to hurt him anymore. He was supposed to be strong.

He’d gone to the cabin. The one he used to go to with his father. They had fished and hunted and roasted marshmallows. He had gone there for a break about a month after his father died. He just wanted to remember. Two weeks, staying in their cabin, fishing and hunting and roasting marshmallows. Remembering. 

They took him before he even got outside the city limits.

They took him and they carried him away and locked him in a room with no windows and one door with no knob on the inside. The walls were concrete and there were chains on his wrists.

He didn't expect it. He didn't expect them. Of course he didn't. No one even knew they were still around.

It took them ten days to break him. _( Hail Hydra!)_

“You get that I am a Level 2 agent, right?” he said as soon as the door opened. “I don’t even have clearance for the break room.”

“We don’t need you to tell us anything, boy.”

They don’t use the chair on him; it causes too much damage on non-augmented humans. They use more old fashioned techniques. _(HAIL HYDRA!)_

They are experts at their craft, they have honed it over the years. He fights it. He fights it as hard and as fiercely as he can, but he was never going to break free. SHIELD don’t even know he is missing. There is no hope for a rescue.

He knows this.

But still, he fights.

He tells them the right way to roast marshmallows, setting them on fire for a few seconds so the outside has a charred crunch to it. He tells them the different kinds of fish that live in the lake by the cabin. He explains how to identify all the different plants in the forest, the way his father had explained to him. The ones that heal, the ones you can eat, the ones that will kill. He was a park ranger, Edward Sitwell.

He talks about everything he can think of. Anything to distract him from the pain, the fear, the desperation. **_(HAIL HYDRA!)_**

He still falls.

He surrenders.

He breaks.

**_ HAIL HYDRA! _ **

 It is almost a relief when he is stopped. As he falls, plummets towards the ground, the screaming, pleading voice in the back of his head –finally, finally- goes quiet with one last whimper. All there is is the rush of air past his ears and the words ‘thank you’ repeating in the short seconds before he hits the ground.

Then there is nothing.

* * *

 

 

 

_Hail Hydra._

 

 

* * *

 

 

  

She isn’t sure why they all assumed that Bucky was the only one who was damaged. Who was brainwashed.

She watches people she knows and complete strangers. She sees them torn apart. She hears their minds shatter. Hydra takes them apart and puts them back together as a mockery of themselves.

She watches Brock Rumlow break over and over again. He was raised in Hydra and he tried to escape at 16, then again at 27. His screams echo for a long time.

The next time he appears in the films he is a true believer and he is doing the breaking.

 

Her first thought is _Steve must never know._  Her second thought is that that is unfair.

 

She has to tell him. Has to. Steve has a way about him. He has a way of making you honest.

 

He doesn’t cry, but the face he makes… he insists on watching the films. All of them. Every person Hydra broke beneath their boots. She tries to stop him, but when Steve Rogers is determined to do something, the only one who has a chance of holding him back is James Barnes and he is too broken right now to do anything so helpful.

He watches these men and women, good men and women who had lives and families and wanted to serve their country, he watches them fall apart. Torn apart. And he adds them to the burden on his shoulders.

She hates him a little right then. What right does he have? They were no one to him, strangers. He has met maybe two of them. She knew these people, some intimately. She trusted them. She had believed that they had willingly betrayed everything that they stood for and she had taken pleasure in killing them, imprisoning them, stamping them out.

“Natasha,” he says, pausing the film (Agent Moses, they had gone on more than a dozen missions together) “You don’t have to watch. I can finish them myself.”

“What?”

“You’re crying.”

She isn’t. She wouldn’t. She brushes her cheek and her fingers come away wet. It has been years since she cried. The last time was shortly after Clint brought her in from the cold, after they wiped out her trigger words and she was herself for the first time since she was a child. She had only cried in artifice since then. Cried to get what she wanted, cried to make people underestimate her.

Now she cried, not for herself, not for the child she had been, but for the people she had known.

“Play the damn tape.”

They have a duty. Someone should know that these people were not what they were thought to be.

 

Someone should know.  

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: non-explicit torture, brainwashing, loss of identity. Referenced/implied child abuse. People crying. Referenced death of a parent. Let me know if I forgot anything!


End file.
